Google's answer to Facebook 'Instant Articles' is launching early next year

Google's project to boost the speeds that news articles load on
smartphones will kick off "early next year" with several large
media organizations already committed to support the effort,
Google said in a blog post.

The so-called Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, or AMP, is a
new tech standard spearheaded by Google that seeks to speed
up web page load times on the mobile web.

The project is Google's answer to
Facebook's Instant Articles, which some publishers such as
the New York Times and The Atlantic began using earlier this
year and which speeds up page load times by letting
publishers upload their content directly to Facebook.
Business Insider also plans to publish content using
Facebook's Instant Articles.

Battle for control and eyeballs

The dueling mobile publishing standards are the latest
skirmish in the battle between Google and Facebook to serve
as consumers' main gateway to online content, and to reap the
lucrative advertising revenue that comes with it.

Google does not want media organizations to publish their content
directly on Facebook's platform, which is generally not
accessible to Google's search engine. AMP is Google's effort to
keep publishers and content on the open web.

"Google will begin sending traffic to your AMP pages in Google
Search early next year, and we plan to share more concrete
specifics on timing very soon," Google Search Engineering VP
David Besbris and Head of News Richard Gingras wrote in a blog
post on Medium on Tuesday.

Google says AMP HTML will "dramatically improve" the
performance of the mobile web by allowing website owners to build
lighter-weight web pages that have a reduced reliance on often
clunky technology such as JavaScript. By using AMP, publishers
can employ caching techniques to essentially pre-fetch and
store a web page so it's loaded on to a user's device before they
even click on it

According to Google, "thousands of publishers" have expressed an
interest in AMP
since it was previewed in early October and companies
including AOL, CBS Interactive, and Slate have "committed their
support" to the project. And Google said that several ad partners
such as OpenX and DoubleClick (which is owned by Google) were
also working withing the AMP "framework" to improve the
advertising experience.